I was bummed to read that tomorrow's assignment will be The Daily Shoot's last. While I've only shot 18 assignments, I enjoyed watching other people do assignments. Funny enough, I was planning on picking up and doing some assignments next week with a new camera I just acquired, the Fuji X100. (I'm sure I'll post about that separately, once I have more than an initial impression.)

In any case, it was fun while it lasted, and I appreciate the work that went into creating and maintaining it.

The Flickr blog has a really fun story of someone who visited the first and last shuttle launches, and had similar photos made at both. It was nice that they made the photos obviously related, but didn't obsess with making the second one too much like the first. Both pictures feel real, where the second could feel much more staged than it does. Nice.

As anyone with an internet connection knows, Netflix recently raised its prices by an effective 60%. I keep seeing comments about how people are going to "get back at them" by canceling their disc rental plan when the new pricing takes effect. Guess what? That's what they want you to do. They want to close that part of the business down, so they can be an internet company. No more distribution centers, labor-intensive mailings or physical media.

Personally, I like Netflix's streaming service, but I like high-quality HD more. I'll put up with streaming for an old TV show, but I want to watch new content in HD, preferably in the highest quality available, which means Blu-ray. So, if I can only keep one of them, I'll keep the discs, thanks. And you should too, if the message you want to send is that the streaming catalog and quality aren't good enough to justify this move yet. If you really want to flip them the bird, cancel the whole shebang, I guess.

Canceling your discs is rewarding their current actions.

I participated in the Livestrong Challenge in Davis yesterday, and it was a well-run event. I did the 70-mile bike ride.

As you can see, it was a pretty flat ride, compared with the previous two years in San Jose. It was also much nicer weather, with the San Jose rides being very, very hot. This year was very pleasant, only getting into the 80s around noon. We finished much faster as a result; I finished with an 18.4 MPH average speed compared with around 13 in previous years.

I rode with Shane this year, and this kind of ride is definitely his strength. He kept our pace high, and we made excellent time through the first half of the course. Unfortunately, we didn't get to eat breakfast before the ride, and I started to bonk a bit about then. I ate everything in sight at the 35-mile "power station", filled my pockets with food and kept eating on the bike. I couldn't keep pace with Shane after a few more miles, so I settled into a pace that I was sure would get me to the finish line. One more power station and food about 55 miles in, and I started feeling better. I managed to hook up with a couple of riders who were keeping a better pace than I'd been doing on my own, and one I could contribute to. We rode into the finish about noon.

Shane did really well, coming in second of all the 70-mile participants and a fast average speed of 19.5 MPH. Very nice!

Thanks a ton to the people who sponsored me this year. The year since the last Challenge has been a bad one for our family regarding cancer; Val's mom was diagnosed with a recurrence, and has been fighting it hard. Hopefully the donations that events like this one raise will turn into real cures someday.

I've now done a few rides at Fremont Older OSP, which is nearby my new-ish office. It's one of those places that's not a mountain biking destination, but its proximity to home and work make it a great place to ride in the middle of the week. It tends to be popular for that reason, with trail users of all kinds. Horse riding seems to happen earlier in the day than I get there, and I'm sure that's by design. Fremont Older has nice vistas of the Silicon Valley. It's got a couple nice singletracks, notably the Seven Springs Trail and the Toyon Trail. It's got a spot on my regular ride rotation now.

I was saddened to read that Doctor Who's Sarah Jane Smith, actress Elisabeth Sladen, died of cancer this morning. Sarah Jane was the Doctor's companion when I was first introduced to the show as a kid, and she'll always have a special place in the series to me. I was pleased to see her return to the show in recent years.

The New York Times' David Pogue has a good article on the Flip's demise that thoughtfully contradicts my earlier hypothesis that video functionality in smartphones would kill the Flip.

But most of the world doesn’t buy iPhones. Of the 1 billion cellphones sold annually, a few million are iPhones. The masses still have regular cellphones that don’t capture video, let alone hi-def video. They’re the people who buy Flip camcorders. It’s wayyyyyy too soon for app phones to have killed off the camcorder.

True, but don't you imagine people very quickly deciding to put the $200 they might have spent on a Flip towards a better phone? I mean, who wouldn't rather put their $200 into a better phone than a unitasker, unless they really do a lot of on-the-fly video?

Second, it isn’t true at all that nobody’s buying Flip camcorders. So far, 7 million people have bought them. Only a month ago, I was briefed by a Flip product manager on the newest model, which was to hit the market yesterday. He showed me a graph of the Flip’s sales; Flips now represent an astonishing 35 percent of the camcorder market. They’re the No. 1 bestselling camcorder on Amazon. They’re still selling fast.

Good points, and I agree that this was probably a premature death, although I still think that death was inevitable given a bit more time. Hopefully one of Flip's competitors can step up with their products and fill the hole left by Cisco's bumbling. I feel most sorry for the 550 people who lost jobs because of Cisco's mistake. It's tough to work on an exciting product and have it get killed; having that happen to a well-liked product like the Flip must be particularly galling.

Panic has released Prompt, a simple, clean SSH client for iOS devices. I've installed it, used iTunes to send my SSH keypairs to my iPad and it works flawlessly. Recommended.

In this case, I really do hate to say "I told you so" regarding Flip, which is being shut down only two years after being acquired by Cisco. I really like the Flip cameras, but it's clear that there's no room for a unitasker when modern smartphones do so well with video. I have some friends working for the Flip division at Cisco, and I wish them well; I hope they're able to land softly.

I finally got out on the mountain bike, with others from Passion Trail Bikes. It seems like forever that I've been thankful to get out on the bike at all, even if it is the road bike. I guess I can't slag roadies altogether, though, since on top of having fun my last couple of road outings, the road bike has at least given me some small level of fitness. With that, I was able to enjoy today's ride without completely destroying my cardiovascular system. Of course, other riders are also feeling the early-season, lots-of-rain effects, so the slower group helped me survive intact too.

Waterdog is in remarkably good shape, given the weather. It's only been a couple of days since the last rain, too. There were a couple of trouble spots, but nothing too bad, and the great traction that was available in the rest of the park more than made up for it.

One spot that really is unfortunate is what we used to call "Tony Hill", which is officially Chaparral, just below Elevator. It's always been a nightmare, environmentally--steep and rutted, with poor drainage--but as a fun trail, it's been mutilated.

Last season, the bottom of it fell partially away where water is forced across the trail and down the fall line. A new bridge had been built there, which stabilized the sketchiest part. Late in the season, someone (I assume the city) completely sanitized the upper portion and really made a reasonably challenging section pretty weak. But they didn't really change the grade, nor did they add additional drainage, so water still flows down the trail. Now that the rains have hammered the area, this section is rutted again, and the bottom (before the bridge) is a total mess. Once it dries and crumbles, I think it's going to be worse than before, but less fun. Too bad.

But that's too much bitching about a small disappointment from a fun outing. The weather was impeccable, and it was great to get out.

Back at Passion, the post-ride food was sashimi and other Japanese treats, put on to benefit Japanese affected by the earthquake. The food was good and the cause a good one. And the Silicon Blonde on tap is always a great way to end a ride. Good stuff.

It's been 22 days since my last ride on the bike, mostly because of the soaking we've been getting here in the Bay Area. But today was pretty nice out, so I got in a ride on the road bikes with Shane and Greg. The ride was similar to what we'd been doing before the rains, but it's amazing how 22 days just destroyed any (admittedly small) amount of headway I was making in the fitness department. Still, I'm enjoying the road bike a lot more than I used to. The rest of the week is supposed to be nice, and since the trails are going to be soaked for some time, I'm planning on getting a little commuting on the bike in.

Also, since the last time I rode, Strava finally rolled out a feature to include a ride embed that I can include here. So, here's today's ride:

Ars Technica has published its review of the iPad 2, and it's as complete as is the norm for that site. As I read it, they had many of the same opinions of it as I did in my first impressions. There are some interesting technical details in there, making it well worth the read.

Great story.

You know how in disaster movies, people on the street gather around electronic shops that have TVs in the display windows so they can stay informed with what is going on? In this digital age, that's what the Tokyo Apple stores became.

While not an exhaustive look, I did get to play with a Motorola Xoom today at a store. After the very heavy day of use I've had with the iPad 2, it was quite an interesting experience.

The first impression it made is that feels more cumbersome than the iPad 2. I'm not sure, now that I'm growing accustomed to the new form factor, if I'd have thought the same if I had been using my old iPad for the last 24 hours instead. Anyway, that's what I thought as I picked it up.

The screen is fine. Nothing out of this world, but attractive enough. Swiping from screen-to-screen is fluid, but I was struck by how it really still felt like Android. I say that in surprise, not because it's all that bad a thing, but because I'd read about what a significant redesign the new Honeycomb revision (3.0) is supposed to be.

I played with a few sample apps, including Gmail, the Music app, the Browser app, and a few others. The pinch-and-zoom and scrolling lag in Browser, which I noted on the Nexus S I had (with the previous Gingerbread version of Android) still persists, even with the faster hardware. This really must be a software thing if this tablet with a dual-core processor and improved graphics system still exhibits it. In fact, most of my surfing complaints outlined in that article seemed to persist on the Xoom. To be fair, I only spent a couple minutes with the browser, though it was among the very first things I checked. I did like having the more traditional tab lineup at the top of the screen, and it did seem like the UI of the browser itself had been changed quite a lot, and I liked what I saw on that front. It was quick and responsive from the point-of-view of typing a URL and having the page load and render. I'd say it seemed on par with the iPad 2 there.

Gmail is great on the tablet form factor, and appeared to have been completely redesigned for this form. It seemed smooth and seamless, as it should. Of course, I couldn't deal with my real email load on a public device, but it really did seem well-executed at first glance.

Also much improved was the formally-abysmal Music app. I didn't play music for long, or test the sound quality of the device, but the interface to playing music was much better than the pedestrian UI of its Gingerbread predecessor. I'd be interested to see if there's any improvement in getting media onto the device. I'm also curious if there's any improvement in podcast support, either in this app, or via Google Listen.

All-in-all, I'd say that it felt farther behind the iPad 2 than the Nexus S was behind the iPhone. Yes, a couple of key apps seemed improved, but it just didn't feel like the product had been polished to a perfect sheen like the iPad does. Still, it's good to see a real competitor on the market, and it didn't feel quite as rushed as the articles I've read make out. I hope to get a longer chance to play with one again in the future.